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11-26: The Community (Part I)

For the most part, the practice of Orthodox religious education has been preoccupied with cognitive objectives. Adults as well as Church School educators have structured their course of study around the dissemination of measurable facts. While such subject-centered teaching methods are important and useful, they are nonetheless incapable of producing faith. Such classroom-centered teaching is merely an extension of how out-dated curriculum models that stress teacher-to-student, one-way pedagogy have diverted attention from our experientially-based liturgical tradition to that of repetition, rote and overly rationalistic learning. The unfortunate consequence of such a methodology is an inferior, watered-down version of Orthodoxy.